Participant Checklist

What to do in preparation for the workshop for Early Career Faculty in the Geosciences


To help you get the most out of the workshop for Early Career Faculty in the Geosciences, we ask that you do several things in advance. Here's a list of those preparatory activities and their deadlines:

By April 1:

  • Optional: If you will need financial assistance to attend the workshop, apply for a workshop stipend.

By April 16:

  • Register for the workshop (includes choosing concurrent sessions; see workshop program for choices). The registration form also asks you to upload a photo of yourself for the workshop notebook. This really helps workshop leaders and participants get to know each other more quickly. These photographs will be modified to fit a standard size, which will be small. If possible, please select a photo that features your face (a head shot) instead of one where you are relatively small within a landscape.

By May 7:

  • Pay for the workshop.
  • Inform us of your travel plans. For this you will need to decide whether to make the optional visit to NSF. For information on travel options, see the logistics page.
  • If you are going to NSF, choose your sessions.
  • Complete the index of learning styles questionnaire and report your results.
  • Share your wisdom with your colleagues: based on your experience, what advice do you have for other early career faculty members about time management or work-life balance, or for graduate students and post-docs about the academic job search process?

By May 22:

  • Optional, but STRONGLY encouraged: upload your research proposal summary. (Read the proposal instructions first!) Participants who submit these proposal summaries in advance will get to have them reviewed by one or more of the workshop leaders. Every year, participants tell us that the proposal review session is one of the most valuable parts of the workshop.
  • If you are attending the teaching strategy session on Designing Class Activities and Assignments: upload an activity or assignment. (Note: we will notify you if you are signed up for this session.)

Prior to the workshop:

  • Download the workshop health form, complete it, and bring it with you to the workshop in a sealed envelope.
  • Print out (and bring with you) this annotated map of the campus. (Acrobat (PDF) 68kB Nov28 12)
  • If you are attending the session on Designing Class Activities and Assignments, bring FIVE (5) paper copies each of the actual assignment/activity and of the first page of your submission as it is viewed on the web.
  • If you are going to NSF, keep reading... Otherwise, that's it.

Preparing for Your Visit to NSF

Our visit to the National Science Foundation is always an exciting, energizing part of the Early Career workshop. We will allocate a bit of time during the workshop to get organized for the visit. In addition, to make the most of this opportunity, we suggest that you do the following before coming to the workshop:

  • Prepare a two-page bio/resume (see suggestions below)
  • Review the NSF visit schedule and think about which sessions you most want to attend when there are concurrent sessions.
  • Think about your questions and bring them with your ideas and your energy. Spending the day at NSF is always a mind-expanding experience (and a lot of fun, especially if you are well-prepared!). The program directors are top-notch scholars with their fingers on the pulse of the action in their respective fields. Meeting them is a great learning opportunity and can help you to clarify your research plans and figure out your next steps. It is their job to meet with members of the scientific community and they enjoy their work. We strongly encourage every one to sign up for an individual meeting with the appropriate program director. Participants who met individually with program directors during prior workshops, even participants whose ideas about a potential project were very general, found that the program directors were very helpful in providing feedback for the project.
  • Think about how you will introduce yourself to your program director in about one minute.Your introduction should include: a) name and affiliation, b) disciplinary expertise, and c) your research area or topic including why you think it is an important topic (e.g. relevance to society).
  • Be ready to speak concisely about your favorite one or two research proposal ideas. (Bring extra copies of your proposal summary if you have one.) Either way, be able to clearly state the goal or hypothesis, how this fits within your larger research direction or program, the benefits of this type of research, and how you will accomplish it.
  • Pack professional clothes. (Jeans are probably not appropriate.)

Modified NSF-style two-page bio/c.v.

If you're coming on the visit to NSF, we strongly recommend that you prepare a two-page resume (~5 copies, stapled or copied double sided so that your pages don't get mixed up with someone else's!). The purpose of this resume is two fold: i) to introduce you to the program director and ii) to provide a way for the program director to contact you later to review proposals. We suggest a modified NSF-format "2 pager" biographical sketch. The NSF two pager is the format the you must use when submitting a proposal to NSF. It contains important information for the program directors to use in selecting you as a proposal reviewer (in particular, elements a, c, and d). However, it is too limited to meet purpose (i). So, for our purposes, we advise the following modifications:
  • name, institutional affiliation and contact information - especially email - clearly displayed at the top
  • include a statement of your research goal(s) in a prominent location also near the top
  • include section(s) on professional accomplishments - SHOW OFF - highlight scholarships, grants, awards, leadership positions, some of that great stuff that you have done! You don't need to list every detail, just a few noteworthy items to give a flavor of how terrific you are.
  • expand section (c) to include all peer reviewed manuscripts, with section subheadings differentiating those that are 'published' or 'in press' from those that are 'in review' or 'in submittal'
  • eliminate section (e)